by Greg Olear
But check this:
I’m in a living room—it’s supposed to be the green room on some talk show, Colbert I think, or maybe Letterman . . . I’m the guest, Babylon Is Fallen has been made and is a surprise hit, I’m a Golden Globe screenwriting nominee, maybe even an Oscar contender, I’m vaguely famous, way more desirable than in real life; it’s the (ha ha) Dream Me—but it’s actually the den at Meg and Soren’s house. There are two couches, not matching, at a ninety-degree angle, one on each wall. I’m sitting by myself on the longer couch, all the way to the right, in the corner of the room. On the other couch are a few people, girls I think, whom I can’t identify. Maybe they’re the Suicide Girl–pictorial SUNY coeds, all piercings and tats, who work the counter at the Convenient Deli. I’m not sure. But they all rise as this stunner makes a grand entrance. The newcomer has long blonde hair, straight with bangs, like Jenny Lewis, or Feist, or perhaps Janel Moloney from The West Wing, but she’s not someone I recognize. I can’t really see her face. She sits down next to me in such a way that her skirt—a short skirt, off-white—hikes up, and I can see her white silk panties and her white silk stockings, and the thin white line of the garter running down six inches of bare white leg. I reach out and touch what I see, and I can feel everything—the smooth, almost-cold silk, the heat radiating from her leg, the little ridge where the strap bisects the warm peach-pink flesh. She lifts herself up slightly, so my palm can further slide beneath her ass, and lets out a soft moan. I lean closer to her, my eyes not straying from that glorious patch of leg.
And then, story of my life, I wake up. Or rather, am woken up.
“States!” comes the voice from the baby monitor, holding out the long a as if singing. “Daddy! I need my states!”
I squint at the clock: 5:03.
Jesus Fucking Christ.
I must have fallen asleep, mouse soundtrack or not. The way I feel—hung over, but without the preceding alcoholic reverie; headache, dry mouth, general lethargy—I almost wish I hadn’t.
“States!”
I drag my ass out of bed and haul it up the stairs. Our house is a Cape Cod, with the master bedroom at ground level. Both kids sleep on the second floor, separated by a tiny hallway and bathroom; the noise doesn’t travel much from room to room, and Maude has slept through fireworks displays, but I hustle anyway so she doesn’t wake up. One kid this early I can handle. Two? Please God no. I burst into my son’s bedroom.
Roland sits on his bed, legs crossed like an Oxford undergraduate’s, his left foot rotating like a ceiling fan in one of his Lamps Plus catalogs, reading a thick grown-up architecture tome I bought him last year at Barnes & Noble, A Field Guide to American Houses (which American Libraries hails as—get this—“the definitive field guide to American homes.”). His hair, now at the midpoint between the white-blond he was born with and the sandy brown it will one day become, and cut in the pixieish style popular in our crunchily hip town, poofs up to such a degree that his (handsome, much more so than his old man’s) face appears too small for his head. The light by the door is on, as usual—he won’t sleep without a light on anymore; monsters—but the pendant light over the bed (a present for good behavior) is still off, so he’s reading small print in the dark. Spread out in front of him on the bed is an oversized Rand McNally road atlas of the United States. What he likes to do is cross-reference; he matches the location of the houses in the Field Guide (as he calls it, with emphasis on the second word)—Cleveland, Ohio; Louisville, Kentucky; New Albany, Indiana; Rolla, Missouri—to the respective dot or yellowed area on the roadmap.
He won’t turn five for two more months.
Littered about the room, among pages torn from the Field Guide and various lighting catalogs and maps, as well as countless pieces of myriad toys—Lincoln Logs, Tinkertoys, Legos, bristle blocks, Trios, Thomas tracks, Thomas engines, Playmobil accessories, and a few neglected dolls we got him to encourage pretend play—are foam-rubber pieces from a giant puzzle of the United States (for purposes of scale, Wyoming is about the size of a Pop-Tart). Roland is obsessed with states in general, as evidenced by his cross-referencing game, and these states in particular. He plays with them as if they’re dolls—“What are you doing there, Connecticut?” he’ll ask. Texas and Alaska, I notice, are now stuffed into the bedroom of one of his dollhouses. He sleeps with the states at night, like Maude does with her stuffed animals. On those rare occasions when he actually assembles the puzzle, he insists on placing the states in alphabetical order—Alabama is first, then Alaska, and so on—and he’ll often stack them that way. He knows them in that order because my sister sang a state song for him, two months ago, that rattles off all fifty in alphabetical order. She couldn’t have sung it more than a handful of times—she was only up for the day—but he knows it cold. He never gets the order wrong, never even pauses to think about what comes after Delaware.
“Some of my states are downstairs,” Roland says, by way of greeting. His eyes are aimed in my general vicinity, but he’s not really looking at me. “Louisiana, West Virginia, Maryland, California . . . ”
Florida. That’s what comes after Delaware: Florida. There are no “E” states.
“And this was worth waking me up for?” I say this for my own benefit; he doesn’t pick up on sarcasm. One of the useful symptoms of his complaint, for a father who likes to crack wise—I don’t have to worry about him catching on.
“Maude brought down Maryland,” he informs me. “I brought down Louisiana and California. Then Maude brought down West Virginia.”
“I have to get my coffee,” I tell him, tiptoeing my way across the tornado’s-been-through-it mess of his room and flipping on the pendant lamp. “You have to put the light on when you read, okay? It’s bad for your eyes to read in the dark.”
If he hears this, there’s no indication. “And the states!” At last he looks me in the eye, although there’s something ever-so-slightly off about his gaze; making direct eye contact for him is the equivalent of me holding a difficult yoga pose. “Bring the states, you stupid Daddy.”
I should probably reprimand him for calling me stupid, but he doesn’t really mean it, and I’m too tired, and anyway, he’s not exactly wrong.
“Relax, would ya? Keep it down. I’ll bring the states, I’ll bring the states.”
I go back downstairs to the living room, where, in a sloppy half-pile on the couch, I find California, Louisiana, West Virginia, and Maryland. I bring them back to his room, where I leave Roland, now quiet and clam-at-high-tide happy, with fifty-four puzzle pieces (forty-nine states plus five Great Lakes; Massachusetts went missing last week, probably due to his habit of hiding pieces in his room and promptly forgetting where he’s put them). My brain attempts to formulate a joke about how, since my son is such a “statesman,” that must make me a Founding Father, but without the caffeine, it just won’t come.
THE WORST PART ABOUT WAKING UP LIKE THIS IS NOT BEING ABLE to lie in bed for the nine extra minutes alarm clocks allocate for snoozing and reflect on my dreams. While my dream life, as mentioned, is about as rich and fulfilling as my sex life—so much for compensation—if I’m not consciously aware of what my subconscious was working out when I pass from one state to the other I couldn’t pee because the urinal was in a little room with a four-foot ceiling and I couldn’t stand up, right, now I remember, let’s move on, I am left with the naggingly unpleasant sensation that I’ve forgotten something important, and, often, a headache that all the coffee beans in Colombia can’t dislodge.
This morning, in particular, I’d like to process my dream. Who was the woman in white? Why were we at Meg and Soren’s house? Wherefore the fixation on the garter? And, most importantly, what does it all mean? If I were still seeing Rob, I’d bring this to the next session, but if there is to be a next session, it will be next month, next year, next decade, some magical time when the Lansky ledger is back in the black—and frankly, when the Lansky ledger is back in the black, I don’t think I’ll be needing therapy.
No, I’m on my own with this one.
Josh’s Law of Dream Analysis, which stunning accuracy belies its illicit birth as a dormroom joke, goes like this: if your dream is about sex, it’s not about sex; if it’s not about sex . . . it’s about sex. Because, you know, your subconscious likes to fuck with you. But Josh’s Law does not apply here. My subconscious is not fucking with me this time. Sex is as sex does. The cigar in this dream, Dr. Freud, is just that: a big fat Romeo y Julieta maduro clamped between the yellowed and feral chompers of Fidel Castro. The cigar is a cigar.
Soren Knudsen can’t remember last night.
He updated his status at 4:08 a.m. EST—a little over an hour ago. Already he can’t remember? How much hootch did he drink?
Ruth Terry great article
with a link to Bob Herbert’s latest Times diatribe.
I’m gonna go out on a limb here and predict that Bob Herbert is grousing about Republicans.
Gloria Gallagher Hynek and Brady List are now friends.
Here’s what you’re in for, Brady List, whoever you are: liberal use of the LIKE button, oft-shared YouTube links to grainy live sets by unloved grunge bands, and frequent updates involving Haven that speak of the towheaded lad as if he were the Messiah. Enjoy.
In addition to tending to the insatiable needs of two preschoolers (sippy cup of watered-down apple juice, Z-bar and/or bagel with cream cheese, Noggin On Demand) and a vociferously greedy and shrill cat (Friskies Buffet, release into the pitch-black yard), the following elements comprise my pre-dawn hours: coffee, Facebook, fetch the newspaper (if it’s there), horoscope, more coffee, e-mail, glass of water, bathroom, more coffee, bagel, another glass of water, Facebook, e-mail, bathroom, shower. The order sometimes changes, and the shower is often sacrificed for expediency, especially when Stacy is away, as she is, for the fifth Fifth! The very word screams for hard liquor morning in a row. But coffee is always first. Coffee is paramount. When parents pray to the God of Easy Mornings, the burnt offerings are roasted coffee beans.
Ceramic tiles cold on my bare feet, I scoop the ground manna into the Proctor Silex, pour the water (the dishwasher attachment doohickey saves me the trouble of first filling the pot), hit the magic button. There is a timer mechanism, but any time I’ve tried to use it, I’ve set it for the wishful-thinking hour of six o’clock, only to have to start it manually well before that; setting the timer on the coffee maker is the wake-up equivalent of mentioning a no-hitter in the seventh. I stumble into the bedroom, fall into my faux-leather desk chair, and return to the laptop.
Jennifer Hemsworth is in a relationship, and it’s complicated.
That’s understating things.
Mike DiLullo became a fan of The Colbert Report.
Wow, Mike, way to take a stand.
Simone Smithson hope heaven is peacefully cause I’m sick of crap.
I’m right there with you, Simone, [sic] and all.
Outside the window, a black abyss. Only my faint reflection in a pane well-fingerprinted by tiny hands. Steve is still asleep, curled into a ball—a hairball, if you will—at the foot of the bed. The mice, mercifully, have moved on. Through the baby monitor I can hear, in the “East Wing” of the upstairs, Roland banging around with some or other toy, probably his Thomas tracks, judging by the clatter and the proximity to the microphone; in Maude’s room, all quiet on the Western Front. I should probably jump in the shower now, while I have a fighting chance, but no, not without the coffee.
Sharon Rothman was tagged in an album.
Wow. Her hair was big, back in the day.
Matt Harris just barely has enough sense to not download and start playing a new video game at 2 a.m.
Michelle Strange just beat Laurence Rand in Three Towers Solitaire.
Unless you have a Sibylline personality disorder, how can you beat someone else in solitaire? It’s been a while since I took French, but doesn’t solitaire imply solitude? Isn’t the point to beat yourself? (Right-click, hide updates from Three Towers Solitaire. I’m a big fan of the HIDE feature, a huge concession in the historic treaty that ended the Mafia Wars.)
Eugenia Last is a syndicated astrologer. In the picture they run with her column in the Poughkeepsie Journal—which won’t be deposited on my driveway until six thirty or so; I’m on her website now—she is attractive, with long, kinky blonde hair and the Slavic features (wide, flat face; tiny eyes) she shares with Debbie Harry, Neko Case, Michelle Pfeiffer, and my friend Meg. Eugenia’s New Age bona fides are impeccable. Every morning, she offers up her oracular wisdom, and, while lesser pliers of the zodiacal trade fall wide of the mark, damn if she’s not bang-on most of the time. When Eugenia Last proclaims a five-star day, the heavens will smile upon you . . . but if she metes out the minimum two, you’d best go back to bed.
Raising the ceramic chalice of the Mud of Christ to my unworthy lips, I take my first sip of coffee—a perfect blend of Fair Trade Organic Kenyan Gold, light cream, and Splenda, in a well-stained Clifford-the-Big-Red-Dog-sized World’s Greatest Dad mug—scroll down the page, and receive cyber-auspices from my kinky-haired prophetess:
SCORPIO (Oct. 22–Nov. 21): You will have difficulty following through with your plans. Expect disruptions, delays and last-minute changes. A change in the way you feel about someone can lead to a breakup. You will gravitate toward someone more compatible and less restrictive. Two stars.
Okay, then. A suck-ass blurb and two stars. For the third day in a row, I might add. Fucking bonanza. On the plus side, both Roland and Maude (and Stacy, because the two ladies in my life are both Virgos) have four stars. Twice my celestial bounty. Perhaps their luck will rub off on me? If not, there’s always the sun will come out tomorrow, which, after three two-star days in a row, is almost guaranteed bet your bottom dollar to yield five stars. All I have to do is survive today, and I’ll be alright. It’s only a day away.
Stacy Ferguson Lansky Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz . . .
Well put, honey. Updated at 2:03 a.m. Just after eleven, California time. Right after we last spoke.
Todd Lander became a fan of Duran Duran.
Sue Wilson Amorosi is glad to see wonderful postings from friends today, including this one that I need to remember: Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving each other, just as God in Christ also has forgiven you. Ephesians 4:31–32
Easier said than done, St. Paulie Boy. Easier said than done.
As I polish off the first cup of coffee, I set about composing my own status update, a practice I regard with the same solemnity that Obama does the drafting of an executive order.
Josh Lansky has a two-star day. I hope Eugenia Last is wrong.
Josh Lansky up at 5:03 am. Again.
Josh Lansky Day Five of The Ordeal.
No, no, no.
I hate when I want to update my status and can’t figure out what to say. They should have a Sniglet for that. Wait . . .
Josh Lansky Not Necessarily the News.
Definitely not feeling it this morning. Chalk one up for Eugenia.
Again I consider a shower—almost-scalding water streaming down the back of my pinkening neck is the closest I’ll get to a spa vacation until Maude is at Vassar, or whatever overpriced liberal arts school she winds up majoring in English at—but I decide that caffeine intake is more exigent on the priority list, so I pour a refill. Why does the second cup never taste as good as the first? Would it help if I made a fresh pot? Or used a fresh mug? Diminishing returns.
Half past five now. Still pitch black outside, not even the hint of morning. Nosferatu still on the clock, and Bill from True Blood.
Emily Hoyt killed Nya in Vampire Wars. Emily has a kill record of 83.
I wonder if eighty-three is good or bad. There’s no context for us non–vampire warriors. It doesn’t seem impressive . . . unless, of course, Emily has staked the hearts of eighty-three real people.
Becky Stack If my
liver survives this week, I’m totally taking it out for beer.
It would prefer a Jack and Coke.
Jessica Holby Up early with Emma and Maddie & looking fwd 2 the playdate.
Better hit the LIKE button. Facebook etiquette. Emily Post would advise hitting the LIKE button when the hostess of a playdate you’re attending updates her status to trumpet said playdate. Even if the hostess is too lazy to write out “to.”
I open Outlook, another of my constant companions. I am a compulsive inbox checker. I pound the SEND/RECEIVE button like a Skinnerian rat on the plunger in one of those Eisenhower-era, pre-PETA psychology experiments in which many animals were harmed. More e-mails! More messages! More information! More more more! But when I get actual notes from people, from friends I haven’t heard from in a while, from my drinking buddies in New York, from my housemates from college, I let them twist in the inbox wind. I fail to respond. I have a mental block about writing back—probably because I have nothing to say, no self-aggrandizing news to share, no humble pie to serve up. Invariably they ask how the screenwriting “biz” is doing (in no other line of work do people employ that term), if I’ve sold another script, when we might see Babylon Is Fallen playing at a theater near you. While my stock reply—George Clooney is interested—is not completely untrue (although the is, by now, is probably more accurately expressed as was), what I don’t elaborate on is that his interest is—that his interest was—directly proportional to the willingness of a studio to pour tens of millions of dollars into the project. Actors are the face of Hollywood, but they don’t call the shots, literally or figuratively. They’re like the British royal family—all pomp, no power. But this is moot. I haven’t even opened Final Draft, my screenwriting software, in a good year, and that was to try my hand at a vampire thriller, an exercise in cranking out schlock. What can I tell my friends? That I’ve given up the ghost? No, better to stay silent, cultivate some mystique.